WINNER: CBCA Book of the Year, Eve Pownell Award for Information Books, 2002 This multi-award-winning book tells the story of how Anangu from five different language groups came to live together at Papunya. From the time of first contacts with explorers, missionaries and pastoralists, through to the Papunya art movement and the Warumpi Band, this multi-layered text finally leads us to the development of the unique educational environment that is Papunya School. As an example of two way learning, it is a profound metaphor for reconciliation.
In the early 1970s at Papunya, a remote settlement in the Central Australian desert, a group of Indigenous artists decided to communicate the sacred power of their traditional knowledge to the wider worlds beyond their own. Their exceptional, innovative efforts led to an outburst of creative energy across the continent that gave rise to the contemporary Aboriginal art movement that continues to this day. In their new book, anthropologist Fred Myers and art critic Terry Smith discuss six Papunya paintings featured in a 2022 exhibition in New York. They draw on several discourses that have developed around First Nations art—notably anthropology, art history, and curating as practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpreters. Their focus on six key paintings enables unusually close and intense insight into the works’ content and extraordinary innovation. Six Paintings from Papunya also includes a reflection by Indigenous curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who reflects on the nature and significance of this rare transcultural conversation.
Papunya- A Place Made After the Storyis a first-hand account of the Papunya Tula artists and their internationally significant works emanating from the central Western Desert. This momentous movement began in 1971 when Geoffrey Bardon, a hopeful young art teacher, drove the long lonely road from Alice Springs to the settlement at Papunya in the Northern Territory. He left only eighteen months later, defeated by hostile white authority, but a lasting legacy was the emergence of the Western Desert painting style. It started as an exercise to encourage local children to record their sand patterns and games, and grew to include tribal men and elders painting depictions of their ceremonial lives onto scraps of discarded building materials. With Bardon's support, they preserved their traditional Dreamings and stories in paint. The artistic energy unleashed at Papunya spread through Central Australia to achieve international acclaim. These works are now regarded as some of Australia's most treasured cultural, historical and artistic items. The publication of this material is an unprecedented achievement. Bardon's exquisitely recorded notes and drawings reproduced here document the early stages in this important art group. This landmark book features more than five hundred paintings, drawings and photographs from Bardon's personal archive. It tells the story of the catalyst for a powerfully modern expression of an ancient indigenous way of seeing the world.
Catalogue for exhibition that tells the story of the emergence of one of the most dynamic movements in Australian art history with its constellation of painters such as Rover Thomas, Mick Namarari, and Emily Kame Kngwarrye.
Challenges the convenient way in which white Australians have often 'forgotten' indigenous people from the 1950s onwards. This book talks about the work of many well-known Aboriginal artists, writers and performers, including Gordon Bennett, Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Tony Birch, Kim Scott and Alexis Wright.
Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists presents, as never before, the biographies and works of over 200 Aboriginal Western Desert painters from the world-acclaimed Papunya Tula Artists company in Alice Springs, Australia. Established in 1972 as a co-operative
Containing cutting-edge research the Handbook of Research on Creativity will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in cultural studies, creative industries, art history and theory, experimental music and performance studies, digital and ne
Bardon is an ex-art teacher who supplied materials to the artists of Papunya when stationed there in the early T70s. This is a record of his association with them, accompanied by colour reproductions of 20 artists' work with explanations of the symbolism used.
We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, Dark Writing argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How, this book asks, can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans? And how can we redraw the lines maps and plans use so that the qualitative world of shadows, footprints, comings and goings, and occasions—all essential qualities of places that incubate sociality—can be registered? In short, Dark Writing asks why we represent the world as static when our experience of it is mobile. It traces this bias in Enlightenment cartography, in inductive logic, and in contemporary place design. This is the negative critique. Its positive argument is that, when we look closely at these designs on the world, we find traces of a repressed movement form. Even the ideal lines of geometrical figures turn out to contain traces of earlier passages; and there are many forms of graphic design that do engage with the dark environment that surrounds the light of reason. How can this "dark writing"—so important to reconfiguring our world as a place of meeting, of co-existence and sustaining diversity—be represented? And how, therefore, can our representations of the world embody more sensuously the mobile histories that have produced it? Dark Writing answers these questions using case studies: the exemplary case of the beginnings of the now world-famous Papunya Tula Painting Movement (Central Australia) and three high-profile public place-making initiatives in which the author was involved as artist and thinker. These case studies are nested inside historical chapters and philosophical discussions of the line and linear thinking that make Dark Writing both a highly personal book and a narrative with wide general appeal.
